Past research has shown that visually presenting an object can activate associated structural and functional information. We contrasted the relative impacts of form and action information carried by verbal labels in a visual identification task and an action production task. We paired eight novel graspable objects with novel actions and identified each object/action pair with a verbal label that carried information that was congruent or incongruent with either the form of the object or the action associated with the object. We then presented participants with sequences of learning trials where participants saw each object/action/name triad, and test trials where participants were presented with individual objects. Furthermore, we either asked participants to imitate the actions during learning trials, or to only watch the action demonstration. In Experiment 1, participants visually identified each object using its label (no action was produced), and in Experiment 2, we asked participants to produce the action associated with each object (no naming was required). In both experiments, using labels carrying congruent information facilitated performance. Importantly, labels carrying information congruent with an object’s form facilitated performance to a greater extent than using labels carrying information congruent with an object’s action. Learning condition did not impact the results. Interestingly, only action information seemed to drive error patterns – when labels were incongruent with an object’s action, participants tended to produce errors associated with label information. These findings confirm that information associated with verbal labels is recruited when these are used to identify novel objects, and that when congruent, this information can facilitate naming and action performance. Importantly, this finding indicates that form information associated with verbal labels may carry more weight than action information, even when the task is to perform actions and naming is not required.